Cambridge charity Alzheimer's Research UK has announced a £30m Drug Discovery Alliance, launching three flagship institutes in the city, Oxford and London.
The Discovery Institutes at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and University College London (UCL) will see 90 new research scientists employed in state-of-the-art facilities to fast-track the development of new treatments for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.
With dementia affecting more than 830,000 people in the UK a year, increasing political focus on improving the outlook for people with dementia in recent years has led to small increases in research funding - but there remains a desperate lack of effective treatments for those with the condition.
However, the Drug Discovery Alliance will make a major contribution to delivering a network of Drug Discovery Institutes dedicated to early stage drug discovery. Each Institute will be led by a Chief Scientific Officer working with some of the UK's leading academic researchers based at each of the three universities and Alzheimer's Research UK's own in-house research leaders.